Webdriver hangs for ~1 minute even if chromedriver exits immediately

[tullmann]

This isn't a direct problem with webdriver, but it does make diagnosing other problems harder. I had a bug in my chromedriver wrapper script, and it was exiting immediately. But webdriver will hang for a minute before reporting a problem, and will just report a timeout, not that the chromedriver failed/exited.

I believe the core of the problem is in javascript/node/selenium-webdriver/remote/index.js where the command.result().then handler will not kick the httpUtil.waitForServer in the case the command exits early/immediately.

The patch below demonstrates the problem by adding a test for using /bin/false as the chromedriver. It times out after a minute.

diff --git a/javascript/node/selenium-webdriver/test/chrome/options_test.js b/javascript/node/selenium-webdriver/test/chrome/options_test.js
index eab3070..39524b9 100644
--- a/javascript/node/selenium-webdriver/test/chrome/options_test.js
+++ b/javascript/node/selenium-webdriver/test/chrome/options_test.js
@@ -204,7 +204,7 @@ test.suite(function(env) {
     driver.quit();
   });

-  describe('Chrome options', function() {
+  describe.only('Chrome options', function() {
     test.it('can start Chrome with custom args', function() {
       var options = new chrome.Options().
           addArguments('user-agent=foo;bar');
@@ -219,5 +219,16 @@ test.suite(function(env) {
           'return window.navigator.userAgent');
       assert(userAgent).equalTo('foo;bar');
     });
+
+    test.it('can catch bad startup script', function() {
+      var options = new chrome.Options().
+        setChromeBinaryPath('/bin/false');
+
+      driver = env.builder().
+          setChromeOptions(options).
+          build();
+
+      driver.get('nothing');
+    });
   });
 }, {browsers: ['chrome']});

[tullmann]

Thanks for the quick fix!